Any discussion of the background art throughout the specification should in no way be considered as an admission that such art is widely known or forms part of common general knowledge in the field.
Audio and visual experiences are becoming increasingly complex. In particular, the spatialization of audio material around a listener has progressed with increasing levels of complexity. From the historical mono, stereo and other audio systems, the art has recently seen the introduction of almost full spatialization of the audio sources around the listener in production systems.
FIG. 1 illustrates schematically the simplified structure 1 of creation and playback of a general audio visual presentation. Initially, a content creation system is provided to author audio visual presentations 2. The authoring normally involves spatialization and synchronisation of a number of audio sources around a listener. The overall presentation is then initially ‘rendered’ 3 into one or more file forms 4 containing the audio and visual information for playback to a listener/viewer.
The rendered file is then distributed for playback over various media rendering environments. Unfortunately, the playback environments can be highly variable in their infrastructure. The rendered file is then rendered for playback in the particular environment by a corresponding rendering engine 5 which outputs speaker and display signals for playback by a series of speakers 6 and visual display elements 7 for recreation of the intended audio visual experience around a viewer.
One particular audio spatialization system is the Dolby Atmos™ system which allows the audio content creator of an audio visual experience to localise a plethora of audio sources around the listener. Subsequent rendering by the rendering engine of that audio material by signal processing units and audio emissions sources allows for the replication of the intentions of the content creator in spatializing the audio sources in positions around the listener.
The actual audio emissions sources (or speakers) placed around a listener in a listening environment may be variable and location specific. For example, movie theatres may include a plethora of speakers placed around the listener in different relative positions. In a home environment, the speaker arrangement may be substantially different. Ideally, the created content is able to be rendered to variable speaker arrays so as to reproduce the intentions of the original content creator.
The rendering of a series of audio sources to a speaker array such as that provided by the Dolby Atmos system is likely to significantly tax the computational resources of any rendering system.
There is therefore a general need to provide for a simplified audio rendering system at the point of delivery.